Creators are the new editors

2026 will be the year the creator-news divide finally stops making sense. For years, we talked about creators as competitors, disruptors, or distribution helpers. But among young audiences, creators have already taken on something much more fundamental: they are performing editorial work. And the more newsrooms resist acknowledging this, the harder it becomes to understand why their traditional approaches no longer land with under-25s.

Creators already shape how young audiences expect information to sound and feel. They set the emotional tone, the narrative pacing, the visual grammar, and even the sense of urgency around an issue. That isn’t "influence", it's an editorial role. A creator deciding which angle to foreground, which sentence becomes the hook, which detail becomes the emotional anchor, is making the same decisions a news editor or audience editor makes every day. Young people trust these decisions because they feel coherent, native to the platform, and tailored to how they actually consume information.

Journalists, meanwhile, are being pushed, sometimes reluctantly, into creator-adjacent storytelling. Not to become influencers, but to adopt the pieces of creator culture that genuinely improve journalism: direct address, multiple quick publishings, personal context, and a clear, recognisable voice. A journalist who can think like an editor and publish like a creator will be the newsroom’s most valuable asset.

In 2026, the winning formula won't be "creators doing journalism" or "newsrooms copying creators." It will be a new hybrid role: the creator-journalist, equally fluent in editorial judgment, platform logic, and narrative intimacy. Newsrooms that understand this will redesign roles, workflows, and expectations around cross-functional storytelling.

The future isn't creators versus journalists. It's creators as journalists, journalists as creators, and the platforms quietly acting as the new assignment editors.